Boeing CEO takes aim at Musk’s Starman-in-a-Tesla stunt Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg took a shot at SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launch during a discussion with Politico’s Robert Allbritton last night. After commending the innovation of the new-space community, while pointing out that Boeing had had its claws into the space industry since the dawn of spaceflight, Muilenburg was keen to …
With the recent investment in Reaction Engines Limited, this may stand a chance of becoming a reality
Hmm, whatever fraction of the £26M that was shared between Boeing and Rolls Royce. Not exactly a massive injection of cash, considering the size of either company, more an expression of polite interest.
All this pro-Musk talk ignores the inconvenient fact that Musk's shots derive their funding from NASA (i.e. taxpayers) just like Boeing's do.
Musk can't go to the moon on NASA's dime because, well, it costs more than the said dime.
I reckon NASA might usefully examine a model wherin they run the launch facilities and provide a telemetry consultancy for private firms who get the chance to belly up to the bar and do what they claim to be able to do - make spaceflight a reality via the private sector and it's money.
The taxpayers can lease space on said flights just like Musk and Co want right now, but the expensive R&D should be funded privately or these buggers should shut the fuck up about "private industry vs government projects". If I'm helping pay for it it ain't private industry that is getting the job done, it is a partnership that too many "entrepreneurs" don't acknowledge openly or often enough.
Something along the lines of "With our expertise and the vital funding from taxpayers hard-earned money, we can make this a reality".
No, I'm not holding my breath. Then again, I'll never float in the vacuum of space, so notwithstanding the same companies paying for the dismantlement of the EPA and the deterioration of the "free as in" air I probably won't have to.
All this pro-Musk talk ignores the inconvenient fact that Musk's shots derive their funding from NASA (i.e. taxpayers) just like Boeing's do.
Not really. I am quite mindful that SpaceX is receiving huge amounts of taxpayer funds, just as I am mindful that compared to SpaceX, NASA's progress (and, by extension, Boeing's) seems positively glacial.
If this fact is inconvenient for anybody, it's NASA and Boeing.
On their own dime, instead of wasting mine, for a change? Fat chance. Popcorn ready, but I call TOTAL BS. Tell you what mister insecure CEO - I'll pay the new price for that used car to help you with the costs. And yes, given your Total Inability To Space Unusual Pickup devices....
I'll even buy you the beer.
Because with your normal launch costs, anything a mere millionaire could recompense you is barely a rounding error - and that's the (double precision floating) point.
A marking of territory. If the test show promise they'll beg the government for the cash for the next phase. BAE have increased their existing investment so it must be making progress.
As much as everyone screams about the subsidies SpaceX has gotten, they were quite literally peanuts compared to what gets dumped into Boeing every year.
Sod the barge, coordinated twin landings of the boosters in the middle of pads next to the launch pad stole the show. It could almost have been footage from the pre-launch computer generated video of how things were hoped to go.
It's watching things like that which make you realise we are living in the future.
That's not what Lee and Perrins print on their labels.
They say Worcestershire, as the picture on their Wikipedia page will show.
I grew up watching Thunderbird 3 land vertically thinking how cool and idea it was and it simply sparked my imagination as a child. However I grew up and that spark got slowly extinguished that no-one had yet managed this outside of tethered test rockets. Elon Musk with his double booster landing and every other falcon 9 first stage landing has made me realise once again that anything is possible and I should never give up on the imagination of him and people like him. The spark is back and I'm off to watch some Thunderbird 3 err I mean falcon 9 first stage landings on YouTube.
It was science fiction in reality. My 91 year old father cried. They used to go out to watch a plane fly overhead in Rotherham. And had horse drawn rubbish carts. And electric trolley busses. And I nearly cried as well.
Like to see the mars thing. Love to see Heinlein city on the moon, which we probably need, because of the cheap delta v and lots of stuff there.
Doubt if I will live to see anything else, but one can hope.
It's funny... Congress bitches about the embarrassment of launching American national security satellites on Russian engines, but they forget the original agreement was to get a license to produce a copy of the engines in the US and then work on improving them... which Congress then refused to fund.
Fuckers. Incompetent illiterate hillbilly goat fuckers.
So if Russia has indeed embargoed the engines (which I haven't heard) then I will laugh so hard, my liver will probably fall out. One of the very few times I will agree with Putin.
"So if Russia has indeed embargoed the engines (which I haven't heard) then I will laugh so hard, my liver will probably fall out. "
They might have to buy more launches from the cheese eating surrender monkeys who quite sensibly use their own engines. Or offer more cash to Musk :-)
SpaceX upset the launch the market by coming in a showing they could do similar stuff to the incumbents but much cheaper. But assuming that drives costs down for everyone, that has to be a good thing for the American Tax Payer (and everyone else who wants to put a something in space). But it seems that many people (including this Boeing dude) are still treating this as a zero-sum game. i.e. that every launch SpaceX (or whoever) does is a launch that they don't get to do. I can see why the car industry might be worried about Tesla, for example, because (very roughly) someone in the market for a new (pricey) car is only going to buy one so, yes, you might lose a sale to someone else.
But in the space industry a big bottle neck has been cost and availability, and now it looks like costs are going to go down and the availability of all sorts of different and new launch capabilities is going to go up. In that environment can't all of them benefit from the new customers and types of customer that will appear?
Could well have missed something here but it does seem like a situation in which they should all be able to benefit because they are jointly creating a market that doesn't currently exist.
@AC - well I think there is an extent to which, yes, that's exactly how some companies think. Part of the business case will be the launch cost and that just got slashed. But there could also be some other cost savings brought on by the new capabilities. Naively you could speculate that a manufacturer could look at their bill-of-materials for the satellite they are just about to build and ask the question "next year I can launch something twice the weight for the same price so how much money can I save by making the chassis out of cast iron rather than <exotic alloy> ?" This might just end up being a $/kg issue: FH is 1400 $/Kg to LEO which is already nearly twice as good as F9 (at 2700 $/Kg) and both those are substantially better than ULA has ever offered (depending on which figures you use you can guess between 5 and 10 times better).
"Part of the business case will be the launch cost and that just got slashed. But there could also be some other cost savings brought on by the new capabilities. "
That's _exactly_ what's happening.
Most of the cost isn't the launch mass in any case. It's that high launch costs drive high payload costs by engineering the shit out of the payload and building hundreds of prototypes of _everything_. (the actual unit costs of the flight spares are only a small percentage of any mission cost) If you can afford increased risk then you can build fewer prototypes, which means massively decreased overall bottom line figures.
Those same high costs add even more complexity by causing "everything including the kitchen sink" to be thrown onto a mission, especially if it happens to be going outside earth orbit (eg: Mars). Mission creep is a very real danger. Cheaper launches mean that you can afford to have more, cheaper launches. On the other hand you can also afford to stick on hitchhikers for interplanetary missions like a dozen beagles (don't laugh, the concept was sound, but quality british funding arrived far too late to be of any use, so the probe went with "string and sticky-tape" prototype level hardware because there was no time left to make space-rated stuff before launch.)
For GEO communications birds, bigger is most definitely better. It means bigger, more foccusable antenna arrays, bigger more powerful transmitters (and more of them), bigger fuel tanks for stationkeeping and longer life on orbit. Every single increase in launch mass capacity since the 1980s has been enthusiastically taken up by the big boys very quickly.
> very few not think "hey, let's build and launch a satellite because prices are down!"
No, the thinking is more along the lines of "we really need this satellite... but it's just too expensive" - a lot of the smaller countries say that about space.
There's a lot of stuff out there to launch if it didn't need to be wrapped in pure gold first.
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